The European Employment Strategy (EES) aims to promote convergence towards higher employment and lower unemployment by soft law instruments. Previous studies in the Europeanization literature on the impact of the EES are mainly focused on active labour market policies. This article explains cross‐national variation in national passive labour market policies. Building on new pooled time‐series data, the empirical findings reveal the presence of a convergence process among the most advanced economies regarding passive labour market policy efforts, with the EES fostering this trend even further. Furthermore, the findings support the argument that the EES creates pressure on governments to reform domestic labour market policies, but this pressure varies across countries and over time. The findings provide new insights into the relationship between Europeanization and convergence, which may be relevant for EU co‐ordination more generally – for example, for the EU 2020 strategy.